Mechanical storage, defragmentation aside, is still my favourite kind of storage.
It lasts.
Want to save something? Take your hard drive, put it in a drawer. Get one of those USB->Sata cables/stations.
Can't trust discs, they spontaneously combust. With hard drives, if you treat them good, they won't break without notice.

You would be surprised, one of my friends has had two hard drives less then 2 years old die within the last two weeks. At least the manufacturers cover their asses with 3-5 year warranties, but still, I don't trust all my data to a mechanical HDD. I have had drives last over 5 years before, which means they were of good quality, but considering how much faster technology is advancing in every area of computers right now, I am concerned that quality and durability when it comes to drives lasting might become an issue. That said, I'd not touch a Seagate drive with a 10 foot pole these days, at least Western Digital drives last and are built like tanks.

---------- Post added 2012-09-28 at 08:24 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Holo

I don't need storage that lasts. I just need it to be fast.

I don't have much value for my data. There is nothing important on those hard drives. That's all stationed on USB flash drives.

My entire music collection and bought TV episodes and movies are stored on a mechanical drive, stuff that would take me months to acquire again due to my bandwidth limitations, so yeah I really care about the durability and long life of a hard drive.

1. Cost per GB needs to be equal or close to it. Everyone's storage requirements simply can't shrink to accommodate a full transition.
2. Reliability improvements. Currently, SSDs are only more reliable in theory, not practice. Firmware issues (and in turn drive failures) are way, way above the MTBF of a mechanical.
3. OS and hardware support need to be massively improved. Currently there's a lot more hoops that one has to jump through to get an SSD running optimally both in the OS and on a hardware level. Using the correct SATA port / controller on the mobo, setting AHCI and disabling a handful of Window's features via the registry editor and buried advanced settings dialogues are all things that the average consumer would be completely lost in doing.

1. Cost per GB needs to be equal or close to it. Everyone's storage requirements simply can't shrink to accommodate a full transition.
2. Reliability improvements. Currently, SSDs are only more reliable in theory, not practice. Firmware issues (and in turn drive failures) are way, way above the MTBF of a mechanical.
3. OS and hardware support need to be massively improved. Currently there's a lot more hoops that one has to jump through to get an SSD running optimally both in the OS and on a hardware level. Using the correct SATA port / controller on the mobo, setting AHCI and disabling a handful of Window's features via the registry editor and buried advanced settings dialogues are all things that the average consumer would be completely lost in doing.

Most people don't install their own computers. And the people that do know about this stuff. Honestly i don't think it's that big of a deal.

Most people don't install their own computers. And the people that do know about this stuff. Honestly i don't think it's that big of a deal.

There's a very large group of people that don't build them, but upgrade them as time goes on. Shrugging off the fact that an SSD installation requires an extra 10 steps through the bios, registry editor and so on as "not a big deal" is pretty ignorant. It obviously needs to be improved vastly regardless.

He's talking about AHCI, which is set in BIOS. Only the Z77 UEFI has by default been set to AHCI.

Beyond that, SSDs need to be simplified on OS level next. The extra 10 steps are an unnecessary addition for users to have to take care about, and any sort of "well people know how to do it" is a ridiculous approach to things. If that was the stance people should take we'd still be using console. >.>

Simplifying the process is a step that everyone benefits from, and so not doing it is stupid.

He's talking about AHCI, which is set in BIOS. Only the Z77 UEFI has by default been set to AHCI.

Beyond that, SSDs need to be simplified on OS level next. The extra 10 steps are an unnecessary addition for users to have to take care about, and any sort of "well people know how to do it" is a ridiculous approach to things. If that was the stance people should take we'd still be using console. >.>

Simplifying the process is a step that everyone benefits from, and so not doing it is stupid.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. Don't take me wrong. But i don't think the deal is that big personally :X

I guess it's microsoft/apple/whoever has control of linux is on the ball now for better recognizing SSD's and turning the appropriate settings.

I already had my defrag turned off. But there were indeed a few missing links, still.

Were they used internally, or were they in a drawer sometime? If the first, my point still stand.

Location is irrelevant. Moving a drive around puts physical wear on it and you run the risk of damaging the motor or PCB if it's outside of a housing. If the drive is constantly spinning inside your computer due to use, that is putting wear on the motor. Yes, I am aware that motors have a tendency to last a long ass time in hard drives, but for me, I am not someone who encodes videos and things of that nature that uses hundreds of GB's of space at a time. My computer is for gaming, I don't really need mechanical drives since I don't even have more then 500GB of games yet.

I'm ashamed of my current "rig". Soon to be 8 year old laptop bought a couple months before the release of World of Warcraft. It's an Acer 5920G with Intel Core 2 Duo processor (T7300), NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (1024 MB), 2 GB DDR2, 160 GB HDD and that's pretty much it Working fine for World of Warcraft, GW2 and such, but I can clearly say that I'm unable to play BF3. COD is on the other hand possible! Which amazed me.

I'm ashamed of my current "rig". Soon to be 8 year old laptop bought a couple months before the release of World of Warcraft. It's an Acer 5920G with Intel Core 2 Duo processor (T7300), NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (1024 MB), 2 GB DDR2, 160 GB HDD and that's pretty much it Working fine for World of Warcraft, GW2 and such, but I can clearly say that I'm unable to play BF3. COD is on the other hand possible! Which amazed me.

I'm ashamed of my current "rig". Soon to be 8 year old laptop bought a couple months before the release of World of Warcraft. It's an Acer 5920G with Intel Core 2 Duo processor (T7300), NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (1024 MB), 2 GB DDR2, 160 GB HDD and that's pretty much it Working fine for World of Warcraft, GW2 and such, but I can clearly say that I'm unable to play BF3. COD is on the other hand possible! Which amazed me.

I am surprised it has lasted this long, Acer laptops are generally pretty bad for quality imo

And really guys, how about making a thread discussing SSDs and how to optimize them and their future rather than doing it in Post Your Gaming Setup? :P Honestly surprised this has been going for a good page or more...

We are starting to go offtopic really far, but i just feel like adding this one detail to the thread before putting it back on the rails:

Folks, this thread is slightly (and by slightly, I mean really, extremely, distantly) off-topic. It's purpose is to post builds and then talk directly about those builds. If you have questions or want to make general comments, make a new thread or use the chat-thread. Also, please don't backseat moderate, if you think something/someone is breaking the rules, report and move on.

There's a very large group of people that don't build them, but upgrade them as time goes on. Shrugging off the fact that an SSD installation requires an extra 10 steps through the bios, registry editor and so on as "not a big deal" is pretty ignorant. It obviously needs to be improved vastly regardless.

Is it different for storage drives, than the one you install windows on. My motherboard picked up the ssd fine and even automatically set trim support in the bios. I was confused at first cause cause I was for sure i was going to have to do something.. I'm considering another ssd for games storage to keep most stuff off the OS drive.. If I ever messed with videos I'd get a large hdd but I dont.

Edit:
Directly related to my current build two pages back.. Figured I'd edit to clear that up so I don't get moderator spankings :P